Threat of a new war intensifies, while the last war casts its shadow

The repercussions from the suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv nightclub on Friday could be extremely serious. Although the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships seem to be trying to ensure that the carnage doesn’t derail their current truce, the bad news is that fingers of blame are now being pointed at Damascus.

Its been well known for some time that Syria is one of the nations on Bush’s hit list. Bush’s second administration is stuffed with neo-conservative fanatics who support both aggressive Israeli expansionism and a fiercely militaristic US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Syria remains a long-standing rival of Israel, which it is technically still at war with, and a disobedient irritation for the US.

The charges against Syria are now these: that its been providing assistance to the insurgency in Iraq, that it had a hand in the recent murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, and that it was involved in Friday’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

If Syria really is responsible for these crimes then, given the bloodthirsty disposition of the current administration in Washington, Damascus must have a developed either a death wish or terminal stupidity to act in such a crude and provocative way. If the charges stick then the US and Israel will have what political capital they need to threaten and to inflict military consequences, hardly something they’d shy away from. It should also be noted that the actual evidence for Syrian involvement seem extremely thin on the ground. For example, the accusations of Hezbollah involvement in the Tel Aviv bombing don’t ring true considering the current policies of that group.

Middle Eastern nation in the neo-con crosshairs. Flimsy evidence of wrongdoing used to justify military action…….is any of this sounding familiar?

Will the UK trot along behind any more disastrous American military adventures? The British government will be especially displeased that its behaviour in the run up to the Iraq invasion is back under the microscope if a new chapter in Bush’s “War on Terror” is about to begin. The picture now emerging is that Britain promised the US total support on Iraq in April 2002, then spent a year lying about how military options remained open, pursued UN authorisation for something it would do anyway because it needed the legal cover and, when that authorisation was not forthcoming, concocted some torturous legalistic justification of its own to the effect that this was not really a new war but effectively a resumption of the 1991 Gulf War.

With the current tensions over Syria and Iran, and with the governments responsible for the last disaster still in power and supremely unapologetic, the demonstrations against US/UK warmongering in London on 19 March will be more important than ever. As former US Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter warned recently, Iraq might come to be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration. Whether or not that proves to be the case is entirely in the hands of the western public. Our governments can hardly act without our consent, or at least our acquiescence.